Monday, May 2, 2011

X-Fire Game: The one week reprieve

So, I am back with another installment of our much loved (hated?) game of statistics (voodoo?) using our all time favorite (reviled?) tools...X-Fire and Raptr.

From this point, I will pull back reporting these to maybe every two weeks. This should allow us to see if any drastic changes are happening in the market...and lets me try and write a bit more "commentary" (arguments) on a regular basis.

Lets get started. First off, all data listed is from two weeks ago and will be versus this Sunday's numbers.

(KEY: Click the logos to understand what X-Fire or Raptr is. For the symbols...↓ Means the game had a loss; ↑ and the game is in green text, means it had more players. Thank you.)

Rift - 2973( 3982 ↓)

EvE Online - 1928 (2017 ↑)

Lord of the Rings Online- 1859 ( 1892↑ )

Aion- 1929 ( 1878 ↑)

Star Trek Online- 345 ( 287 ↑ )

Dungeons & Dragons Online - 324 ( 326 ↓ )

Age of Conan - 280 ( 245 ↑)

Champions Online - 235 ( ??↑ )

Warhammer Online - 155 ( 130 ↑ )

Final Fantasy XIV - 122 ( 131 ↓ )

DC Universe - 25 ( 41 ↓ )

So, as we can see here, Rift still has not found the floor. What will it's actual ceiling be?

We could look at how drastic this loss is and do this little bit of fun...

World of Warcraft X-Fire chart April 18th - players 33,611 (32,822↑ )

And of course find out where most everyone went.

Rift does still have a large lead over the number 2 game, and with patch 1.2 coming in less than 2 weeks, I expect my next report to see some added player action.

The rise of players in other games were minimal (except for a few stand outs)...

Aion had a big jump. I could look at this as the bonus of "paid transfers". I also think accounts were activated over the weekend too (I got an email about it). So, this may most likely be temporary. Or is this a sign that the game may hold a few new subs?

Star Trek rocked some nice numbers, with a great leap, making it our #5 game on the chart.

Several; other small triumphs was Warhammer, who has been patching their screw ups recently, Champions client was fixed and is reporting again (last report, CO was broken and reporting ZERO players) and Age of Conan also seeing some numbers increasing.

A pretty good week for the games considered failures by a contingent of players.

****

Rift- 2394 ( 2705 ↓) players

EvE Online - 1010 ( 967 ↑)

Lord of the Rings Online - 766 ( 751 ↑ )

Aion - 530 ( 457 ↑ )

Champions Online- 192 ( 225 ↓ )

Final Fantasy XIV- 191 ( 152↑)

Dungeons & Dragons Online- 173 ( 159 ↑ )

DC Universe - 136 ( 179 ↓ )

Star Trek Online- 96 (101 ↓ )

Age of Conan - 89 ( 94 ↑ )

Warhammer Online - 86 ( 84 ↑ )

And as is normally the case, Raptr tells us a different story.

Rift's drop is not as harsh as for X-Fire. And if we look around we can see where some of these players are heading to.

Of course, Raptr is also BIZARRO world, where Final Fantasy XIV...probably the worst rated MMO in a long time, has a huge jump. Oddities indeed.

The one thing we can always count on here is our top 4 though. Rift, EvE, LOTRO and Aion seem to hardly budge from their respective slots. Rift as we can see here has over double what EvE is showing and EvE is almost doubling Aion's numbers.

I think we can safely say that players having such an abundance of MMO's have more places to go and play around in to try various new worlds.

****

Whats clear here is the hold World of Warcraft has over it's player base. Hard to pull players out and into other MMO's. With the news that most of the newer MMO's coming down the pipe, specifically Star Wars, a noted WoW killer, being too much like WoW...where does this leave the genre?

This report is pretty much a statement on the sad affairs of our market. We have quite a few good games here, but WoW truly holds sway over all of this domain, and could color the future of every MMO until someone decides "Lets give up".

For now, players need to accept that the genre has been built, thanks to WoW ingenuity (/snicker) and that all MMO's to come will try their best to mimic it until they get one that has all 7 years of content, can be 100% polished and ready at launch with a whole new endgame that no one can describe, but REALLY want to be meaningful.